Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
Random House, 2008. 270 pgs. Fiction

What austere, understated, heartbreakingly beautiful stories come from New England. Sarah Orne Jewett’s “Country of the Pointed Firs” springs to mind as does now Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteredge” which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature last week. Advanced as a “novel in stories,” the book is a series of narratives linked by the title character who sometimes is the protagonist and sometimes just passes through. Olive is a prickly person, opinionated and often brutally outspoken, and she gives her gentle, outgoing husband Henry a run for his money most of the time, but still he loves her as the reader will come to do. Olive, a retired high school math teacher, seems to have either inspired or terrorized her former students, and sometimes both. Her difficulty in showing her son how much she loved him becomes apparent in their strained relationships. But she sometimes shows great depths of insight and compassion which we see in her actions rather than her thoughts--in a word here, a gesture there, towards the characters through whose lives she moves. Continuing the New England theme, many of Strout’s characters, in Thoreau's perfect phrase, live lives of quiet desperation and yet this is a deeply affirming book after all, not to be missed.

LW